YOU ARE HERE

YOU ARE HERE is an exhibition with truth-telling at its core. Artivist, Therese Ritchie, factually examines Australia’s frontier wars and the massacre of Indigenous peoples alongside the nation’s history of coal extraction and infrastructure development implemented by European settlers, mining companies and successive Australian governments. YOU ARE HERE is an unflinching examination of how we got to where we are now.
Created in 2020, Ritchie’s most recent tour de force - YOU ARE HERE - unrelentingly makes apparent her intense discomfort with the processes of land appropriation that resulted in the formation of the Australian nation. Her evocative use of visual digital imagery – much of which is appropriated from familiar historical Australian paintings of landscapes and events commemorating the arrival of European’s in Australia – is overlaid with text and timelines that account for a litany of events, misdemeanours, atrocities, discoveries, manoeuvres and ploys that lead us to this culminating moment in Australia’s history.

YOU ARE HERE prompts the need for wider conversations about truth-telling, care for country, the future of mining and issues of sovereignty in 2021 and is accompanied by a series of engaging public programs. 

Ritchie is Alumni of CDU and an accomplished and committed Darwin-based artist whose art is socially engaged. CDU Art Collection holds the largest collection of Ritchie’s artwork in Australia, some of which was featured in the exhibition Not Dead Yet: a retrospective exhibition of Therese Ritchie and Chips Mackinolty, presented at CDU Art Gallery, 2010. A survey exhibition and eponymous catalogue, Therese Ritchie: Burning Hearts was presented at Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, 2019-20.

YOU ARE HERE is supported by a COVID-19 Response Grant, Arts NT, Northern Territory Government.

An exhibition catalogue for YOU ARE HERE is available at the CDU Art Gallery. Find out more here.

Image: Therese Ritchie (b.1961), They all look the same to me, 2020, digital inkjet print on paper, 50 h x 80 w cm [image]; 60 h x 90 w cm [paper]. Acquired through the Art Acquisition Fund, 2021. Charles Darwin University Art Collection, CDU3404